In retrospect, one of the most surprising things is how young they were. Alberto Salazar was 23; Dick Beardsley, 26.

At the time, though, what was near-shocking was that, with a mile to go in the 1982 Boston Marathon, the world’s best marathoner had company, in the form of an aw-shucks nice guy from Minnesota. The details are still fresh: The 70-degree day. Salazar taking but a few sips of water. Impossibly thin Beardsley wearing a painter’s cap and running with a sponge stuffed down the front of his shorts. Bill Rodgers falling off the pace during the relentless push through the Newton hills. Neither yielding. ("Just being so cottonpickin’ stubborn," in Beardsleyese.) Beardsley stepping in a pothole and, miraculously, loosening his hamstring. Salazar pulling away, inevitably, for a three-second course-record win in 2:08:51, then needing intravenous treatment. And the anticipation that the best was yet to come.

"It was just another date for us," said the drummer on the Miles Davis album "Kind of Blue," which subsequently became the most influential jazz recording ever. Those who make history often see it as another day at the office, the work’s importance coming into proper focus only as it recedes. Certainly, if you had talked to Salazar and Beardsley an hour after Boston ’82, they wouldn’t have said that their competitive careers—and American men’s marathoning—had just peaked.

The Fall of Men

To be a competitive runner is to live in faith. This is not to suggest that running is a religion, or even a spiritual undertaking. But what impels runners out the door day after day? What creates the need to run the sixth repeat of a workout faster than the fifth, and then the seventh faster? Faith that infinitesimal changes at the cellular level are occurring that will matter four months hence; or, as the saying goes, the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Growing up, Salazar wasn’t even the best runner in his family, and his form would make an apt "before" photo in a Pilates brochure. Beardsley was a mediocre high school and college runner who thought his life’s work was dairy farming. Yet Salazar set an American record at 5,000 meters before he was 25, while Beardsley casually resumed running one day and soon after decided to qualify for the 1980 Olympic Marathon Trials.

Now, elucidating faith’s genesis in a runner’s make-up isn’t a chicken-or-egg process. Any number of latent qualities find themselves on call in the first weeks of training, and they shine more brightly as the running lifestyle dampens the unneeded parts of personality. Often, the honed trait remains an integral part of the person long after the last race has been run, a fact for which Salazar and Beardsley have reason to be grateful.

In the fall of 1982, Salazar won his third New York City Marathon, but the curtain of road invincibility had been pulled back. Again he had last-mile company. The next year, he lost his first marathon in the spring at Rotterdam and placed last in the World Championships 10,000. At the 1984 Olympic Marathon Trials, the curtain was yanked further when he was outkicked for the win. "There’s always one guy [who] might get you in the end," he said minutes after Pete Pfitzinger became the first American to beat him in the marathon. This wasn’t the same runner who had so nonchalantly predicted and delivered a 2:09 in his debut just two-and-a-half years earlier. Three months later, running timidly from the start, Salazar placed 15th in the Olympics. It was his last race on the world stage for a decade.

"What happened was, before the World Champs in ’83, I got a real bad cold that turned into bronchitis," Salazar says. "Then I had severe bronchitis. That’s a precipitating factor to asthma. But I didn’t know I had asthma until the early 90’s, when I was wheezing on easy runs at 7:30 pace. Basically, my oxygen supply was being cut off. It just got a little worse every year. I’ve lost close to 45 to 50 percent of my lung function. Most world-class runners have 120 percent of a normal person’s lung function. I’m at only 80 percent of normal."

In the early 90’s, Salazar became one of the first public figures to talk about being on the antidepressant Prozac. He says he took it not for depression per se, but because of the anxiety levels that accompanied his then-inexplicable performance decline. In 1994, with his energy level restored enough to allow solid training, Salazar won the world’s most competitive ultra, South Africa’s Comrades Marathon. He talked of more ultras and sub-2:20 marathons. Instead, Salazar Phase II lasted one race.

"Three months after Comrades, I was doing bounding drills on the grass," he says. "I stepped in a hole and twisted my foot. Turns out I tore my posterior tibial tendon, but I didn’t know it at the time. So I kept running. I wound up rupturing my rector femoris—I know, it sounds crazy!—and having pins put in the navicular bones in my foot. Oh, and a heel bone replacement. I run 7:00 pace every day, but my competitive days are over."

In the Monty Python skit, this is where Beardsley would say, "You’re lucky! We used to pray to have pins put in our feet."

Beardsley is more willing than Salazar to consider that their duel took some irrevocable toll. "There was no way I would have run 2:08 that day if Al wasn’t there with me," he says. "We just about killed each other." But Beardsley was committed to defend his title at Grandma’s Marathon two months later. "There was talk of me running a world record there," he remembers. "Boy, I was really lucky just to win. I ran 2:14. It was tough to get back into training mode after Boston. I was beat up physically and mentally." Beardsley missed the ’84 Trials because of Achilles surgery. "The last competition where I thought I was in good shape was the ’88 Trials," he says. "I knew my competitive career at that level was coming to an end—if I didn’t make the Olympics, it was time to move on to other things. That choice was made pretty easily when I couldn’t see the lead pack at halfway!" Beardsley jogged to the finish in 2:27 and considered himself retired.

He was back in the running news by the fall of 1989, when a farming accident nearly cost him a leg. In the summer of 1992, he was in a car accident, and six months after that, was hit by a truck while running. Multiple back surgeries ensued, and Beardsley went back on the pain medication he had taken after the farming accident.

"I’m telling you, it was a downward spiral," he says. "My dad died in 1995 from pancreatic cancer, so I took pills to take away the hurt of not being able to do stuff to help him. Instead of taking a long hike in the woods, it was so easy to pop pills and forget about life for awhile. By September of ’96, I would say I was on pain meds 90 percent of the time." By this point, however, his knee doctor had ended his prescription, and his back doctor was trying to wean Beardsley off the pills. (Beardsley hadn’t told either doctor about the prescriptions he received from the other.) So Beardsley started forging prescriptions.

"On September 30, 1996, I went into a Wal-Mart pharmacy," he says. "Turns out my name was on a list for pharmacies in a 100-mile radius. When I tried to get the prescription filled, a red flag came up. The pharmacist looked at me, and he never had to say a word. I knew it was over and that I was in a lot of trouble."

Through a Glass, Darkly

At about this time, Salazar was having face-the-music moments of his own. Raised a Catholic, Salazar says that he made a personal commitment to Jesus in college, at which time he started attending meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. "But I didn’t realize the importance of that commitment until later," he says. "It’s not that I was ashamed of my faith. I just didn’t talk about it much."

By the time he won Comrades, Salazar was more vocal. In interviews, he would offer, unprompted, details of how prayer during the last 20 miles of the race helped him to finish. More broadly, he relayed his perception that his running resurrection was part of God’s plan for him, so that he could use his fame as a platform for sharing his faith. To much of the P.C. running world, this was strong stuff. Salazar was like the long-lost uncle whose interest in UFOs had become just a bit too intense since you last saw him, but your memories of the good old days were so fond that it was impossible not to tolerate, even love him, albeit from a safe distance. (Others were more plainly put off—where did he get off talking about God this and God that in the same breath as praising Prozac?)

So by 1996, when his one-race ultra career was clearly not taking wings, Salazar reassessed. "We never know what God’s plan is for us. I thought I was to run ultras. I was wrong—that was not his plan. It’s hard to figure out what his plan is. Through prayer and faith, we can try. I know this: Things change, things happen, and all my injuries happened for a reason." Molly, Salazar’s wife of 20 years, told the guy who set a world best in his second marathon that he always looked at things in too grand a manner. "She said that sometimes we can do our best in humble surroundings," he says, "quietly sharing our faith with others in everyday life."

Subtle, workable change rather than instantaneous world conversion is the thinking behind Salazar’s main professional emphasis these days. He’s the coach for the Oregon Project, a five-year Nike program designed to create a handful of young American men capable of running 13:20 for 5K and sub-28:00 for 10K as a springboard to world-class marathoning.

At press time, Salazar expected to have had hand-picked five to seven promising runners by this summer. The runners will live communally in Portland, OR, and won’t lack for attention. "I just ran and lifted," Salazar says. "With these guys, we’re going to take a comprehensive approach—mileage and workouts, sure, but also crosstraining, making them real flexible with yoga, a strength and conditioning coach, working on biomechanics, everything." (And he means everything: The houses will be outfitted with altitude devices, including one in a family room so that the runners can simulate watching TV at 12,000 feet.)

The logical follow-up, of course, is to say to Salazar that if running and lifting were enough to get him to 2:08... "There are other ways to get the requisite fitness without running 150 to 160 miles a week. Right now, that’s too risky for us. You know, we only hear about the Kenyans who do that who come over here and beat us. We don’t hear about the 200 guys trying to do that who never make it over. We don’t have 200 potential world-class guys, so we have to be smarter and apply Western sport science.

"The guys in this program have to be on the same page as me," says Salazar, who ran within eight seconds of the world record at 10,000 meters a week and a half before Boston ’82. "None of this waiting, waiting to run a marathon. What the hell are you waiting for? We’ll get ’em fast at 5 and 10K, then boom! Look out! Here we come in the marathon!"

Beardsley is less conventionally religious than Salazar, but he too views the past as a prologue to his current activities.

"When I got caught that day in the pharmacy," he says, "I was thanking God. I think I was days away from going to bed at night and just not waking up in the morning." Beardsley was met by two federal drug agents who thought the quantities of the bogus prescriptions he was writing meant he was dealing. ("I was too selfish for that!" Beardsley laughs.) He told his wife, Mary, about the lie he’d been living, spent nine days in a hospital and then started treatment to overcome his addiction. Beardsley, whose parents were both alcoholics, has now been sober for more than five years. (He doesn’t distinguish between booze and pills.)

"I wouldn’t wish what I went through on my worst enemy," Beardsley says. "But never once did I say, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ There’s a reason why the farm accident happened, and a reason why I survived. I talk to groups about farm safety. I know without a doubt that somebody’s life has been saved because of what I went through. Same with the addiction. There’s a reason I didn’t die. I go back every two months to my treatment center and share my story with the people there. I tell them I’ve been in those chairs, thinking I didn’t have a problem."

Talking is an ever-larger feature of Beardsley’s life. In addition to speaking at races and to non-running groups, he’s the morning DJ on a country radio station. (Suggested theme song: "It’s Hard to Get a Leg Up in the World When You Almost Lose One in a Farming Accident.") Beardsley is on the air at 6 a.m. and done in time to meet clients at noon for the fishing guide service he conducts on some of the 400 lakes near his home in Detroit Lakes, MN "Fishing at the crack of dawn-that’s an old wives’ tale," he claims.

Despite the accidents and his schedule, Beardsley runs five to six miles a day. In the summer of 2001, he ran 2:55 at Grandma’s Marathon to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his 2:09 course record victory there. "I get up at 2:45, grab the dog, and am out running at 3:00," he says. (That’s 3:00 as in 3:00 a.m.) "Obviously, nobody else is up at that time. That’s my time. Running is still an incredible part of my life, and a big part of my sobriety.

"I can’t and don’t want to run like I used to," he says. "If I run 6:15 pace at a race now, that’s flying! That used to be my easy pace. People still say, ‘You look so smooth when you run.’ I saw pictures of me running Grandma’s. Aw, man, I’m not smooth at all!

"You know, I thoroughly enjoyed running 140 miles a week, that feeling of being fine-tuned, the competition. And I know it sounds silly, but I enjoy my running as much or more than I used to. It’s a different kind of enjoyment. I treasure it more now."

Last fall, Beardsley found himself with extra time, because open-water fishing season had ended and ice-fishing season had yet to start. He started running doubles and doing 90-mile weeks. Recognizing the resurfacing of his addictive personality traits—the ones that had driven him through the training necessary to challenge Salazar, the same ones that had nearly killed him—he made himself cut back.

"I realized I might get hurt," Beardsley says. "I can’t afford that risk. Not a day goes by that I don’t thank God that I’m still here and still sober. So I can’t afford screwing something up and being unable to run for six months. When you’ve almost had it taken away from you, you realize how precious it is."